Information technology is one of the primary reasons for the unprecedented growth in use of personal computers. Using application programs developed for different personal computer platforms, an application developer may handle information in a variety of ways. Entirely new industries have been founded based on the ability of the personal computer to acquire, store, and manipulate information.
As the personal computer has continued to increase its penetration into the consumer market, users have found that computers are able to replace many traditional “activities”. For example, it is quite common for an individual to keep a calendar in order to maintain their daily events, which is a task excellently suited to the computer. This concept has been extended to the networked computing environment of the Internet whereby calendars are accessible via a network, not just the calendar owner's individual personal computer. Even through interconnections between computers such as that provided by the Internet, however, many application programs used to acquire, store and manipulate personal calendar lack functionality that allows a user to view data across many calendars. Moreover, application such as this lack functionality allowing a user to review events taking place in arbitrary geographical locations as defined by a local user.
In order to assist users in taming vast amounts of information accessible through the Internet, application programmers have developed search engine applications, e.g., yahoo.com. A typical search engine receives one or more keyword parameters from a user and returns a listing of data that incorporates or is a match for the provided keywords. Many search engines, through the use of automated agents such as bots and spiders, collect information by following hyperlinks between documents in order to create an index. The search engine uses the index to create a list of results falling within the scope of the query defined by the user. Currently available search engines have nevertheless failed to provide a solution that allows a user to use current search engine technology to search across calendars for one or more user defined events.
There is thus a need for a system and method that exploits the intersection of web based calendars and search engines in such a way as to allow searches across user defined event for an arbitrary geographic region or regions.